


Capax Infiniti

by indigostohelit



Category: Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 12:52:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/573497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a cornfield in Kansas he orders you stop, pull over. You do, and he climbs out of the car. Come on, he says, and leads you deep into the cornfield, so far you know in your bones you’ll never be able to find your way out without help. He tugs you down to the ground and points up. Look, he says. It’s a harvest moon.</p><p>Sure enough, the moon’s low and red in the sky, like a ripe fruit, and he laughs against your lips. What a world I led you into, Sixsmith, he says, debauchery and glamour and sex. Look at the stars.</p><p>A Bonnie and Clyde AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capax Infiniti

The first and last thing you are meant to see is a comet.  
  
*  
  
Robert Frobisher meets you years before you meet him, or so he says. There's a hundred things Frobisher says that you don't understand, a hundred things he says that you know are lies, but his skin is warm on yours and his artist's hands at once callused and soft, and when he wraps your fingers around a gun you close your eyes and believe: truth is a choice.  
  
In the alleyway behind a cafe in Chicago he gives you your first cigarette. The steam's curling out of the cracks in the street, and the lights of the city drown out the stars. The night smells of ash and car exhaust, and he puts the cigarette to your lips, whispers into your ear, breathe in.  
  
It's hours before you leave that alleyway, hours and a whole pack of cigarettes, and you carefully kiss the taste of smoke out of his mouth. Frobisher's eyes slide shut when he's being pressed up against the wall of the cafe, and his skin is pale against the dark brick, his lips curled in a half-smile. He says, my dear Sixsmith, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  
  
*  
  
In a cornfield in Kansas he orders you stop, pull over. You do, and he climbs out of the car. Come on, he says, and leads you deep into the cornfield, so far you know in your bones you'll never be able to find your way out without help. He tugs you down to the ground and points up. Look, he says. It's a harvest moon.  
  
Sure enough, the moon's low and red in the sky, like a ripe fruit, and he laughs against your lips. What a world I led you into, Sixsmith, he says, debauchery and glamour and sex. Look at the stars.  
  
*  
  
He loops a golden chain around your neck, says, it suits you. You close your eyes and smile. In a corner the owner of the jewelry store whimpers, and Frobisher waves the gun at him and says, for God's sake, man, stop it. You don't at all go along with the ambience.  
  
That night on the rough sheets of your motel bed he arches beneath you and cries out, his hips bucking helplessly, his face a picture of ecstasy. Sixsmith, he says, Christ, Sixsmith, and you are stricken suddenly with the realization that you have fallen in love with a hurricane.  
  
The next morning you wake to his sleeping body, splayed out over the sheets. The sunlight pours over his long and lovely limbs like honey. When he opens his eyes his smile is slow and lazy. You dare to ask, what on Earth are we going to do now?  
  
The same thing we do every day, Sixsmith, he says. Try to take over the world.  
  
*  
  
You go west, and he gives you jewelry, gives you finery, gives you a waistcoat with curling embroidery that fits as if tailored to your body. You go west, and he shoots, shoots again, offers you a cigarette from his lips as banks burn. You go west, and the wind is light in your hair, and the sun burns a trail down the center of the road until it vanishes at a bright spot on the horizon; he kisses you in alleyways, in hotel rooms, in the middle of robberies in front of God and everyone.  
  
When he leaves buildings his footsteps are stained red with the pools of blood spreading outward from the bodies on the floor. He turns, always, to catch your eyes; his smile is like the sun in summer. He says, are you coming?  
  
In the darkness his curling fingers press bruises into your shoulders, and you follow him through the doors of jewelry stores and banks and stolen cars; hell would be almost redundant, now. You wake in the morning to his lips, to his bright eyes and the heat that burns beneath his skin, and you press up into his kisses, dare to catch his hand in yours.  
  
He teaches you to shoot, straight and true and steady. You never ask him where he learned how. He teaches you to lie your way in and out of trouble in the span of a heartbeat. You never ask him where he learned how to do that, either. He teaches you to smoke a cigarette, and his teeth are sharp on your earlobe and his fingers tangle with yours, and when he kisses you it's rough and sloppy and full of pain and you don't ask him where he learned to kiss like that, don't ask him what he's thinking of when he stares with empty eyes out the windows of your motel rooms, don't ask him where he learned how to shoot a gun, don't ask him where he learned how to shoot a gun.  
  
*  
  
You kill your first man on a day when the sun slants dusty and tired in through the windows of the bank. You do it with Frobisher's hand on your arm and his breath in your ear, because you can't do it without him, because he can't do it without you, because you love him and you're learning to live with that. You step forward and slide the barrel of your gun into a man's mouth, and for a moment the world seems to tilt on its axis, as if reality has shifted into a new rhythm; Frobisher's fingers squeeze your shoulder, and you pull the trigger.  
  
The back wall catches the spray of blood and bone. Frobisher's hand is on the small of your back now, and he says, take the money. Take the money and run, Sixsmith, he says, and for God's sake, let's not look back.  
  
*  
  
Your picture turns up in the newspaper three days after that. You're leaning against the hood of a stolen Ford, cigarette dangling from your lips, hat tilted at just the right angle to hide your eyes; your smile is warm.  
  
You took this picture, you tell Frobisher over breakfast. It's from your camera.  
  
I lost the camera in a hotel room, he says. His face is inscrutable. Let the police print what they like. Let them try to catch us if they can. Let them come, Sixsmith. What difference does it make to us?  
  
That night you lie curled together in the darkness, his fingers tracing idle patterns on the back of your neck. The only light is the dim glow of embers on the end of his cigarette; you think you can make out the faint planes of his face.  
  
He says, as much to himself as to you, I saw myself die once in a dream.  
  
You stiffen. He rubs a hand up and down your spine and says, it wasn't frightening. Christ, no. I was in a hotel. I was in the bathroom, and you were downstairs, talking to the manager. Then you started running—I can't imagine what the urgency was, Sixsmith, but you moved like lightning up those stairs.  
  
You say, and then?  
  
You can feel the shrug of his shoulders. And then nothing. Nothing all. Except—  
  
Except?  
  
*  
  
They catch you on a little road in New Mexico. The sun's sinking into the west, and the sky is bleeding red and purple all over the horizon. The clouds are shifting from one shape to another, and Frobisher lifts his face to the desert wind. He looks almost peaceful.  
  
You say, I think we can outrun them, and he reaches over to grasp your hand.  
  
When the first bullet catches your windshield you swerve too far to the right, and the car slides off the road and topples sideways into a ditch, its wheels spinning in the empty air. Frobisher's out of his seat in a second. You're only a moment longer before you're crouched next to him behind the great bulk of the car, and the symphony of sirens is still ringing ever closer.  
  
Are you ready? says Frobisher. You look at him, confused, and he seizes your face in his hands and kisses you as you've never been kissed before, deep and passionate and more heartfelt than anything you've ever known, as brilliant as a firework and over too soon. Then he smiles at you—my dear Sixsmith, it has been nothing less than a privilege to know you—and climbs up and over the car, onto the road. The last you see of him is his head thrown back, his arms spread, the hollows of his collarbones pools of shadow in the oncoming headlights. He's laughing.  
  
It's a few seconds before you follow him. It always has been.  
  
*  
  
Except, says Robert Frobisher, his fingers frozen on your skin, his eyes very far away, there was the most beautiful music.


End file.
